MrKevvy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Tennessee "Teaching the Controversy" Bill Passed Into Law (google.com) 1

Submitted by MrKevvy on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @10:09AM

MrKevvy writes: The Tennessee "Teaching the Controversy" bill was passed into law today.

"A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee.
State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."

Submission + - Physicist Uses Laser Light as Fast True-Random Num (montrealgazette.com) 1

Submitted by

MrKevvy

on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @03:59PM

MrKevvy writes: "An Ottawa, Canada physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography:

"Sussman's new method, involving pulses of laser light in an Ottawa lab, has the potential to create truly random numbers in large quantities, and fast... Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes... It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space... What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman's lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.""

Submission + - Canada Hate-Speech Law Violates Charter of Rights (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by MrKevvy on Thursday September 03, 2009 @12:11PM

MrKevvy writes: The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has found that federal hate-speech legislation violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the equivalent of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights. This decision exonerates Marc Lemire, webmaster of FreedomSite.org but may have farther-reaching consequences and serve as precedent for future complaints of hate-speech.

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